"I wasn't thinking of Miss Ravenscroft," I confessed. "I'm thinking of getting married."
"Married! Married! And leave the stage? My God—it is a sin——!" He clutched the air and shook handfuls of it in my face. "What do you want to get married for?" he demanded. "Ain't you getting on like anything? Ain't you popular? Ain't you making money?"
"All of those," I admitted.
"Well, then?" His wrath which had frothed white for a moment, cooled down into a fluid sort of bewilderment which seemed about to set and harden in a smile of disbelief.
"The man I am going to marry lives in Mexico."
"Mexico! Mexico!" he bubbled again. "I ask you is that any sort of a place for a man to live what marries the greatest tragic actress ever was going to be?
"Ach, my Gott," in moments of great excitement he reverted to the trick of the tongue to which he was born. "All these years I have waited for this, I have said Miss Lattimore is a great actress, she has talent, she has brains, and when she will have passion—Pouff!" He blew out his loose lips and made a balloon with his hands to express the rate at which I would rise in the scale of tragic actresses. "And now that it has happened, she wants to live in Mexico." He deflated himself suddenly, folded his hands over what he believed to be his bosom, and looked at me reproachfully. This being the first time he had studied my face directly since I came home, I suppose he must have seen there my doubt and indecision.
"Understand me," he said soberly, "I have known a lot of actresses, and I want to tell you that this marrying business don't pay. They got to come back to the stage; they got to. You ain't going to be any different down there in Mexico to what you are in New York, understand me. Yah! Mexico!" The word seemed to inflame him. But he had the sense to let me alone for a while.
A few days later I saw in the paper that he had taken the lease of the theatre he had mentioned to me, and I knew that he wasn't counting on my going to Mexico.
I suppose if I had had the courage to look into my own mind to find out what I wished to do, I might have surmised what was going on there from the fact that I didn't mention the idea of marriage to Sarah. I have tried—all this book has had no other purpose in fact, than to try to tell how I came to be in the relation I was to Helmeth Garrett, came into it as to a room long prepared for me, without any struggles or tormenting, and without thinking much about the effect that his presence in my life would have upon my work. I suppose that in as much as I had a man's attitude toward work, I had come unconsciously to the man's habit of keeping love and my career, in two watertight compartments. I found I was not able to think of them as having much to do with one another. Still less had I the traditional shames of my situation.